Cindy Tumiel: The dangers of television

Brain-wasting programming isn’t the only way that television can harm your children.

Researchers looked at records from Children’s Medical Center Dallas and discovered that 26 kids landed in the hospital’s emergency room in 2004 because a television set toppled over and landed on top of them. Nine of the children were injured seriously enough to require hospitalization, two of them in the intensive care unit, the report by pediatricians at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center said.

Apparently, 2,300 children every year are injured by falling televisions, according to the Consumer Products Safety Commission.

Most accidents involve toddlers and slightly older children who climb on the bulky and unstable televisions, which have weight unevenly distributed toward the front of the set, the Dallas doctors said. About a fourth of the cases involved someone knocking the set on top of the child. Half the time, a parent was in the room and witnessed the accident.

The bottom line: The Dallas doctors urged television manufacturers to include printed warnings on these dangers, along with some sort of furniture securing device inside the carton with the television. Parents, too, need to be made aware, said Dr. Floyd Ota, an assistant professor and lead author of the study.

“Our data indicated a lack of parental awareness and an absence of primary prevention as a root cause for the problem,” he said.